Inspiring Stories From Oregon State Graduate Students on 88.7 KBVR FM

Category Archives: Systems Biology

Everyday there is a constant battle between healthy immune systems and parasites trying to harass our bodies. In the case of buffalos in South Africa they cannot simultaneously fight off a tuberculosis infection and a parasitic worm. Their immune system has to choose which of the adversaries it will fight; this decision has consequences for the individual and the health of the entire population of buffalos it encounters. This situation is not unlike those for humans. We are not fighting one immunological disease at a time, but many at once and they can interact to influence how we feel. Our guest this evening specializes in disease ecology, which focuses on how the spread of pathogens interacts with humans and non-human organisms.

Paul while working as the Ezenwa Lab manager at the University of Georgia

Paul Snyder has worked on tiny ticks in New York to wild buffalo in South Africa, but he’s had a very colorful life before beginning his studies at OSU. Even though he loved everything science and technology growing up, there was limited exposure to those fields in high school and he never thought of being a scientist as a career path. To put things in perspective, he wasn’t allowed to buy any video games growing up; instead he programmed his first working computer game at the ripe age of 6, yes six, years old! Paul continued his illustrious career as a 13-year old paperboy, then burger flipper, and eventually working his way up through the ranks to the manger of a Toys R Us store. He realized he wanted to focus on science and pursued his schooling at University of South Florida doing research on the interaction of parasites and tadpoles, then New York counting ticks, and finally University of Georgia as a lab manager. Oh yeah, somewhere in-between he successfully mastered the bass guitar with his band mates and learned how to program virtual reality simulations, but I digress.

In his downtime Paul works on virtual reality apps for us to enjoy

Back in the world of science, Paul is working with Dr. Blaustein’sIntegrative Biology lab group in the College of Science that he first became aware of from his work with South African buffalo’s. Rather than beginning his disease ecology research with human trials, Paul is focusing on the #1 declining vertebrate taxa in the world. Amphibians have been sharply declining since the 1980’s and there have been no shortage of guesses, but sadly few answers as to why this is happening. Paul’s current project has identified a species-virus interaction (e.g. the number of species present impacts how the infection spreads). But Paul’s real interest and ongoing research lies in the very young field of ecoimmunology: how do the immune systems of organisms change over time in response to the environment they experience.

You’ll have to tune in to hear how he plans to rectify the molecular-scale view of immunology, with the large-scale controls from the environment. You can listen tonight September 18th 2016 at 7PM on the radio at 88.7FM KBVR Corvallis, or stream live at 7PM.

There are perhaps a many as one million species of nematodes. Some parasitic varieties can grow to a meter in length, but most are microscopic in size. They inhabit almost every environment imaginable, from salt water to soil, and even human bodies. But it isn’t the symbiosis between a parasitic nematode like hookworm and a human that Danielle Tom is interested in, her research in the Department of Integrative Biology at OSU concerns a particular nematode called Xiphinema americanum.

Despite the fact that nematodes cover most of the planet’s surface and there are probably billions of them thriving on the earth at any given moment, surprisingly little is still known about the worms. Xiphinema americanum, for instance, carries a bacteria specially designed to live inside it called Xiphinematobacter. Studying the evolutionary genomics of these species can help elucidate the phylogenetic, or evolutionary, history of both. This work is important to the United States Department of Agriculture, because Xiphinema americanum is a potential carrier for nepovirus, which can infect important crops like grapes, raspberries, and tobacco via these plants’ root systems, which the worm also exists in a symbiotic relationship with. This sort of an analysis, of an animal and its relationship to its environment at multiple levels of scale and with regard to multiple other species, is called systems biology.